Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 12

picked up speed, leaving a bubbling wake as she sailed south, finally quitting the island. With a heavy heart Andreas looked up at the dark outline, his thoughts a mixture of sweet memory and bitter despair. As the ship pulled further away, he could make out the summit and there against the sky stood the profile of the cairn, just as they had left it, with the cross pointing heavenwards as if to chart the old man’s last journey.

Andreas recalled a moment from the previous day, after he had formed the cross, when he had taken a heated chisel from the embers of the fire in the tile-roofed galley and burnt the old man’s name on the intersecting bar. Maybe one day others would remember this saintly old man with whom he had lived for so many years, through bad times and good. Maybe the whole world would come to know of him, the man who now lay buried on that remote windswept summit under the rude wooden cross which in rough Greek letters spelled out his name - NIKOΛAOC – “Nicholas.”

Andreas and his wife, who stood close beside him at the ship’s rail, took one last look back then they turned to face each other searching for some comfort, lost in emptiness and grief; he had been the dearest friend to both of them. In the end inevitably the vessel drove through the sea and around the headland, out of sight of the island and into the bright day. At least, they consoled themselves, they had Nicholas’ written account of his own life in their possession.

THE JOURNEY